Three books, authors well worth writing about as well

Jan. 5, 2013

Written by

Iowa Cityscapes

During the holiday, I also looked through dozens of books I had hoped to write about last year. Here are three that I saw still available at Prairie Lights.

'Cycling Through Eden'

Ed Kottick is best known locally as a professor emeritus of musicology, the author of several technical histories of harpsichords and the music director for several community theater productions. But with “Cycling Through Eden,” Kottick has created a first novel that has all the engaging historical specificity of David Herlihy’s “The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance” and all the irreverent wit and wisdom of Mark Twain’s “The Diary of Adam and Eve.”

'Looking Backward'

Beth Cody is best known locally for the monthly Writers’ Group columns in which she offers her libertarian take on local and national topics. The difference between those columns and her debut novel — “Looking Backward: 2162-2012, A View from a Future Libertarian Republic” — is the difference between a simple homily and a grand work of systematic theology.

Taking inspiration from Edward Bellamy’s classic 1887 novel, “Looking Backward, 2000-1887,” Cody places a 21st-century history professor in suspended animation and has him awake in the year 2162. And like Bellamy, Cody uses his future storyline to explain how our country could/should function today.

The novel either is the perfect gift to give that special libertarian in your life, or it’s the perfect book for you to read to better understand that special libertarian in your life.

'Man Killed by Pheasant'

The University of Iowa Press has done the world a great service by deciding to reprint John T. Price’s 2008 book of essays, “Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships.”

Whether it’s in his introductory essay, “On Haskell Street” (in which he traces his family’s ethnic Swedish history in the low-income sections of various Iowa towns), in his empathic ruminations on Marvel comics’ misunderstood super-villain Mole Man or in his discussions of Satanic cults, Price always manages to find just the right blend of lyricism and loser-ism.